As of September 1st, 2011, I am an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at UMass Amherst.

My papers are available to download at Academia.edu, so I will not post any more of them here. I will update my list of publication here.

I studied Israeli radio phone-ins, and now I expand to study American Political Radio Talk, including the "notorious" Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hanitty, and Michael Savage. I also branch out to study financial advice on the radio, mainly Dave Ramsey. I also Interested in TV (Jon Stewart) and recently I started working on the "commentsphere" in Israel (talkback), where people write comments to online news stories. Since 1996, I've been studying the intersection of interaction, culture, and the media. My interests lie both in interactions in the media and in mundane interactions, which I studied during my time at the Hebrew University, UCLA, and throughout my dissertation in the University of Haifa. In my graduate studies, I was fortunate enough to work with leading researchers in various streams of Language and Social Interaction research - also known as Discourse Studies: Pragmatics, Socio-Linguistics (with Shoshana Blum-Kulka, RIP), Conversation Analysis (With Emanuel Schegloff and John Heritage), Linguistics (with Yael Maschler), and Ethnography of Communication (with Tamar Katriel). Right now, at UMass Amherst, I am continuing these lines of research regarding public participation, working with our graduate students and by myself to expand the understanding of how ordinary people talk about politics and public life.

More details about who I might be:

I'm a curious individual who is fascinated with the way people communicate. Therefore, I preferred studying for a Masters in Communication over attaining a law degree, to the initial dismay of my parents. I'm happy with that decision, since finding the poetics in the way people talk brightens my day. As a bonus, being a communication scholar also enables me to critically engage in, research, and teach about what most people, including myself, find to be the best leisure activity – watching television.

Influenced by growing up in the Middle East, many of my studies revolve around conflicts - a phenomenon that is all too common. Yet my studies demonstrate that more often than not, language is a basis for shared social and political life.

I enjoy teaching, and have students who became friends, colleagues and faculty in other universities. As a teacher, I believe in hands-on experience for my students, therefore I use active learning methods.

During my Ph.D., I got involved in public life, as a leader of a junior academic staff union. In order to focus on research during those days, I joined a group of friends and colleagues to form an “off-forum”, an unofficial monthly working group who met, analyzed and discussed data from our separate research projects. My membership in this informal yet effective group enabled me to maintain a balance between my political activities and my research.

Since my Bachelor's degree was in general studies, I also enjoyed pursuing a Master's degree in Sociology. My time at UCLA was my first experience living outside of Israel. I was exposed there to the American, specifically west-coast, way of life. I also met many American and international scholars and made long-time friends, with whom I keep in touch to this day.

On top of watching TV, another hobby of mine is writing, and not just for academic purposes. I write several blogs, albeit in Hebrew. In the blogs, I write about politics, football (go Pats!), mundane stories, and a non-fictional chronology of my daily life. Though football is not popular outside the USA, I became a fan back in the sixth grade, since it combines athletics and intelligence. I took football to be a nightly activity, watching it in Israel in the dark of night due to time zone differences, but living in America is a positive upgrade for my football-related sleeping schedule.I aim to do what I love, meaning thinking critically, writing, collaborating and teaching, with a healthy dose of creativity sprinkled throughout. This is why I enjoy (almost) every minute of academic life.